In 2022, BPI expanded its programmatic support for the first time internationally, launching a Global Research Fellowship and Virtual Lecture Series, partnering with Incarceration Nations Network, regranting funding to 13 grants going out to new, existing, and prospective programs outside of the United States, creating a global community of practice, and funding a convening of educators who work in prisons from across the globe in Argentina in April 2023.
The BPI Global Research Fellowship was created to support this community-building work and to increase knowledge about the international landscape of education in prison. Ramiro Gual was named as the inaugural Global Research Fellow. Ramiro is a Ph.D. candidate at National University of Litoral in Argentina where he also earned a Master’s Degree in Criminology. He holds a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires.
Serving in this role for the 2022–2023 academic year, Ramiro joined the 2022 BPI Summer Residency and went on to produce a series of publications stemming from original research, spoke at multiple conferences, and hosted the first year of the BPI Global Virtual Lecture Series bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners who work in fields related to education in prison in the international or transnational context.
Ramiro’s scholarship describes the history and circumstances of educational opportunities in Argentine prisons where universities have been operating for decades.
Check out the article Ramiro published in 2023 for the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, which you can download here.
In-prison University Programs in Argentina: Building Citizenship
Abstract
In Argentina, more than half of the public universities carry out some kind of academic activity inside prisons. Together with their remarkable extension, these heterogeneous programs have emerged in a context that could be considered adverse: alarming increases in incarceration rates, overcrowding, budget cuts and a wider socio-political climate prone to hardening penal responses. This article focuses on three programmes and their potential to build academic communities and alternative modalities of citizenship – both inside prison and post-release, through diverse collective social, political, productive and/or cultural projects. In so doing, it engages in dialogue with the notion of carceral citizenship, which originated in the United States. In Argentina, I contend, this modality of citizenship is not defined so much by top-down formal processes of subjectivization and exclusion, but rather constructed from below and from the outside-in, through the work of in-prison university programmes and their students.
LISTEN!
Last summer Ramiro Gual and Shawn Young ’19, BPI’s Project Lead Upstate Reentry and Capital Region Initiative, sat down together in the Hudson Valley to reflect on Ramiro’s recent visits with BPI students to discuss his scholarship and Shawn’s recent travel to Argentina for the CUSAM global convening where he visited several university programs inside state and federal prisons in and around Buenos Aires.
A transcript of the conversation can be accessed here.
